[lug] debian sarge has gone stable

[Paul E Condon]

I'm coming in late on this thread, so please excuse irrelevant comments.
But...
In Debian, all distributions have code names: e.g. potato, woody, sarge.
Distributions also have what I call a status, which is stable, testing,
unstable, experimental, etc. 
You can choose what distribution you track either by name or by status
within the apt-get system. Most Debian developers track by status 
because they are concerned with bringing new and wonderful things into
Debian and making them work. Most users (all?) should track by name.
Doing so gives them much more control over how Debian messes with 
their life. For example, if you had been tracking Sarge in May, the 
release of a 'stable' version of Sarge on June6 was, for you, a non-
event. You were still tracking Sarge, but now you could relax somewhat
because there will be far fewer new versions of packages which may,
or may not, break your system.
But if you have been tracking the status 'testing', June 6 was a big
deal, because suddenly all sorts of things that have been on hold
like new versions of gnome, kde, and Xwindows are now released into
the update stream and you now have to be on the lookout for them. 

If you are not interested in daily surprises, you should not be tracking
testing now. If you love new surprises, you should be tracking testing
now.

For myself, I have been running Sarge. My life has been uneventful.
Soon, Etch will start having new stuff that is not
available in Sarge. Some time later, the new stuff in Etch will start
working reasonably well. Still later, the stuff in Sarge will start
looking really old. I'll switch some of my machines to tracking
Etch when I guess that the hassles of fixing breakage from new
buggy packages is acceptable. 

On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 12:28:05AM -0600, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 05:21:44PM -0600, David Anselmi wrote:
> >If you've been running testing, why do you want to switch to stable?
> 
> So that I don't have to apply updates to a bunch of machines nearly daily.
> 
> Sean
> -- 

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net